ON SEPTEMBER 17, 1948, Harry Truman began a whistle-stop tour in his long-shot bid
for re-election. It's comforting to know that we once had a man like Truman in the
White House.

Everyone expected the "little man" from Missouri to lose. Franklin Roosevelt's last
legacy was called an accident of history. After 16 years of the New Deal, the nation
was ready for change.

Give' em hell Harry

In Thomas Dewey and Earl Warren, governors of New York and California,
Republicans had the dream ticket. Henry Wallace and Strom Thurman would split the
Democratic vote on the left and right.

A Roper Poll of Sept. 9 showed Truman trailing Dewey by 13 points. In its October 12
issue, Newsweek surveyed the nation's 50 leading pundits on who would win the
election -- all picked Dewey.

But Truman had beaten the odds before -- as an artillery captain in France during
World War I and when he ran for re-election to the Senate in 1940 and almost
everyone (including FDR) deserted him.

As David McCullough relates in his biography, in 1948, Truman campaigned like no
other incumbent in history, riding the rails 21,928 miles in 33 days. He gave 275
speeches (as many as 16 a day) doing everything from mammoth rallies to 5-minute
talks from the rear platform of the "Magellan" at places like Dexter, Iowa.

Truman told audiences, "I'm either for something or against it, and you know it." He
attacked the "do-nothing" Republican Congress and defended his efforts to stop
Stalin's march across Europe with the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan.

People recognized him as one of their own -- a humble man who believed in timeless
virtues. Words like integrity and loyalty defined Harry Truman.

He may have been the only honest man to come out of Kansas City's notorious
Pendergast machine. Of a colleague from those days, he commented, "He's not true to
his wife, and a man not honorable in his marital relations is not usually honorable in any
other way."

Viewing Clinton's numerous infidelities in conjunction with corruption charges that cling
to him proves the wisdom of Truman's obvservation.

At the Potsdam conference, an Army PR officer offered to arrange whatever the
president needed -- "Anything, you know, like women." "Listen son," said Truman, "I
married my sweetheart. She doesn't run around on me, and I don't run around on her."

Truman loved his country the way he loved his family. A 57-year-old senator when
World War II broke out, Truman (then a colonel in the reserves) asked Chief of Staff
George C. Marshall to assign him to active duty. Without even looking up from his
paperwork, Marshall told him he was too old and could better serve in the Senate. As
president, Truman promoted Marshall to secretary of state.

Truman took his courage with him to the White House. By pushing civil rights for blacks,
he risked erosion of the solid South, and ended up losing four Southern states to the
Dixiecrats.

Truman, who was unabashedly pro-labor, needed union support in '48. But when
railroad workers tried to shut down the nation with a strike, he threatened to draft
them.

Over the local opposition of his State Department, including Marshall (whose prestige
was vital to the president's re-election effort), Truman supported independence for the
Jews of Palestine.

Israel's first chief rabbi later told him, "God put you in your mother's womb so you
would be the instrument to bring the rebirth of Israel after 2,000." One of Truman's
aides thought the rabbi was "overdoing things," until he looked at the president and saw
tears in his eyes.

Give 'em Hell Harry treated his staff with unfailing kindness. He once told his daughter,
Margaret: "Always be nice to people who can't talk back to you. I can't stand a man or
woman who bawls out underlings to satisfy an ego."

No plaster saint, Truman was capable of horrendous mistakes, as when he told a
Chicago rally that a vote for Dewey was a vote for fascism (that was exhaustion
speaking, said aide Clark Clifford).

But during his administration, he met more crises decisively -- the Berlin blockade, the
Soviet threat to Greece and Turkey, the Korean War -- than any other president. He
confronted each with determination and a deep-seated belief in the ability of the
common man to shape his destiny.

Truman confounded the media know-it-alls, winning the 1948 election by more than 2
million votes out of 48 million cast. His campaign became a byword for political
courage. Half a century later, we're still just wild about Harry, especially when one of
his successors is so lacking in character.

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